


catch me if you can

by negaprion



Series: F/F (by WLW for WLW) by user negaprion [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst with a Happy Ending, Comfort/Angst, F/F, Forgiveness, Mutual Pining, Short & Sweet, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-23
Updated: 2017-06-23
Packaged: 2018-11-17 22:45:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11278323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/negaprion/pseuds/negaprion
Summary: Sana is just collecting her bounty (or so she tells herself).  Aphra is a dead woman in hiding (or so she thinks).  Both women miss terribly what could have been.  Or will they get the chance to rekindle an old romance?





	catch me if you can

**Author's Note:**

> A little break between finishing my other fic, "Life In Orbit"'s update. Based on the Star Wars 2015 ongoing comic series, with possible brief references also to The Screaming Citadel, Dr. Aphra, and Darth Vader comics. The timeline is a bit switched up, but it essentially happens right before the Screaming Citadel arc.
> 
> Enjoy! <3 Happy Pride Month!

In better times, Sana often imagined a wedding.  They'd land somewhere beautiful, outside of the Empire's reach.  They would build a modest little house, and deck it in fluorescent flowers and string lights.  If she closed her eyes, she could imagine her fingers brushing softly against Chelli's warm cheek.  Cool brown eyes, with no worry or cruelty.  No worry lines on her forehead.  She'd run a palm up her arm, tracing her tattoos, and they'd dance together, as they never had before.  

Sana had thought of this often, in the past.  She'd daydreamed it.  Dreamed it, even, always waking feeling slightly off-kilter, as if perhaps she was in the wrong timeline after all.  

* * *

 

Now, in the seediest of cantinas on the seediest of smog-choked planets, Sana Starros eyed, coolly, the woman that she used to know.  

"Oh, don't look so peeved," Chelli--no, Dr. Aphra, she called herself--said.  Her voice was quiet, but icy.  She looked near the same.  Red vest, slightly scuffed.  Rumpled white shirt, collar kept neatly, and that ridiculous hat.  She was hunched over a mug of caf, barely looking at Sana, her profile washed out in the green light of the bar. "Grudges don't become you."

"Grudges?" Sana let out a laugh of disbelief.  "If I recall, you're the betrayer.  Bit of a chronic one, if I hear correctly."  She pulled a soiled stool out from next to Aphra, and sat down, perhaps a little too aggressively.  "You hold grudges.  I don't hold grudges."

Aphra, still hunched over her caf, shook her head.  She ran a finger around the rim of the mug, gloved hands slow.  For a long while, she did not speak.  

"Thought you moved on," she said, finally, in a tone Sana could not identify.  "Last I heard, you become a 'filthy rebel conspirator'.  And before that, you were hitched to Jabba's number one most wanted."  She brought the mug to her lips, grimacing through a sip.  A smirk, then a pause.  "You know, you could have done worse.  I kind of respect the guy, even if he did botch that prison job.  Takes some serious guts to stand up to the Hutts.  And stupidity.  Lots of that."  

Sana's face heated up.  She frowned.  

"You know that wasn't real," she said.  "It was just a con."

"Isn't it always with you?"

"You're one to talk," Sana snapped back.  She was blushing now.   _Stupid,_ she thought to herself.  How embarrassing.  

Aphra's face had softened.  She huffed out a laugh.  

"You used to do that when I tried to kiss you," she said.  "You were afraid people would stare.  I thought you were so childish."

"We were childish," Sana rubbed her nose.  "A pair of naive nobodies in a changing galaxy."

"Yeah, yeah," Aphra muttered, rolling her eyes, gaze focused back down on the muddy brown of her caf.  There was a stain on the counter where she'd put down the mug, and Aphra rubbed at it, irritated.  Sana remembered her doing that to everything, forever frustrated at the grime of mechanics.  "Fuck the Empire, and all that."

They sat there in silence awhile.  The cantina was nearly deserted, dark, smelling vaguely of nerf milk and blaster fire.  The walls were corrugated and rusted.  Neatly hung pictures caked with dust.  Behind the counter, underneath a green-tinted light, a middle aged Twi'lek woman dozed, her white apron ruffling slightly besides a humming air conditioning unit.  Aphra took another drink of her caf, and made another face.  Sana nearly blushed again.  It was cute.  Innocent, even.  Her nose wrinkled, and she stuck out her tongue, before her face went cold again, and she turned back to Sana.  

"So," she said, finally.  "Are you gonna order something, or shoot me, or are you just here on paid vacation from the mighty Rebellion?"

Sana shushed her violently.  She eyed the cantina nervously.  There were only a few patrons, packed into dark booths.  A shadowy man, or alien, perhaps, grinning with an undetermined mood across the room.  A few Rodians, silently staring at their graying food.  A merc droid, sat silent and stock still, its eyes a steady, evil orange.  Sana shuddered.  She really hated droids.  They'd have to be mindful of their words here, no matter how stagnant the air. 

"You know why I'm here, Aphra," she said, quietly.  She held up a small holodeck.  Aphra's face flickered into blue view, tiny and stony.  DECEASED.  She watched Aphra's real face harden.  It was a familiar look, like she knew the blueprints, but someone had put up a wall where there once was none.

"I guess you only care about the credits now, huh?" She turned away from Sana, and Sana pocketed the holodeck.  Aphra's knuckles suddenly went white on her mug, and Sana instinctively inched her hand down to her blaster, fingers dancing over the holster belt slung over her hip.  She didn't want to.  But she would.  

"I don't blame you.  That's all we  _can_ really care about, isn't it?  No friends.  No family.  No loyalty.  Ship in disrepair, no credits to fix it, no crew." She let out a sour laugh into her mug, then took a long swig.  "At least you know some people who might call you an ally, don't you, Sana?  Solo, the princess, that farmboy the Empire is so fascinated with."

She slammed down her mug loud enough for the Twi'lek bartender to startle awake, looking perturbed, lekku swinging over her slumped shoulders.  She fixed Aphra with a glare.  Behind Sana, the droid and the shadow stirred, but did not move.  

"You know what I think, Sana Starros?" she was facing Sana fully now, arms relaxed, an unreadable expression on her face.  "I think you're afraid.  I think that you've found people you might dare call family, but you're so afraid you'll lose them too, that you force yourself to be as cold and calculating and unfeeling as--"

"I thought I'd lost you!"  Before she could stop herself, Sana had grabbed Aphra by the collar, tears burning the corners of her eyes.  "I spent all that time hating you, and the last thing I said to you--"

 _Don't ever come back._  

"Come with me," she said, before she could stop herself.  Aphra was staring at her, mouth agape, chest heaving.  "We'll run away.  Find somewhere the Empire and the Rebellion can't find us.  No war, no violence.  Just us.  Like it used to be."  

Before she could say anymore, she felt Aphra's hands, warm from the caf, grip her jaw, and she was being pulled, pulled into--

A kiss.  She closed her eyes, lips parted.  Aphra's breath was sweet, her hands on Sana's shoulders, now her hips, now her cheeks again.  

She saw white streamers.  A twin sunset, or perhaps, a moonlight meadow.  Aphra (no, Chelli Lona Aphra) with her hair tied up in flowers, her smile soft, her arms oustretched, the night air cool and--

They were apart again.  Sana let out a heavy breath, and touched her lips faintly with one finger.  She looked up at Aphra, one hand still on her cheek.  Aphra reached up shakily to cup her hand.  Sana knew what she was going to say before she said it.

"I can't," she said.  "They need you.  The Rebellion."

"It's just war," Sana started, half-heartedly.  "We can outrun it."

"We can't," Aphra dropped her hand, turning away from Sana's palm, scrubbing a hand over her eye.  "War never changes, Sana.  We'll be dead before it ends.  They need you to finish it."

You're right, Sana thought.  

"Will I ever see you again?"  Aphra's question shocked her out of her reverie, and she let out a hard breath, and forced herself to smile.  

"Do something bad.  Then we'll see."

Aphra laughed now.  A real laugh, bright and soft.  One Sana hadn't heard in ages.  She clambered off her stool, shuffling in her pocket for a credit.  Sana absentmindedly brushed her cloak to the side, and started out.  She had always hated goodbyes.  She preferred abrupt endings, left closed.  

But Aphra's arms were around her then, and she leaned into them.  She smelled of engine oil, of mechanical things and burning rubber, and something foreign and exotic and most likely smuggled.  

Sana closed her eyes.  This was something she wanted to remember.  To keep with her.  To replace the ugliness that plagued her dreams at night, and the sour guilt that rot her gut.  

Aphra's voice came quiet in her ear.  

"Catch me if you can."

By the time Sana opened her eyes, she was gone, and Sana was alone in a dusky cantina in the Outer Rim, the thick soup of smog from the factories outside seeping slowly in through the swinging door.  

* * *

 

Much later, long since Sana had left that planet, settled into the pilot's seat of her ship as it floated through hyperspace, she would take her cloak off wearily, and something small and metallic would clatter to the deck.  Sana would bend down, nervous.  Her holodeck.  She would activate it, hoping perhaps, to see Aphra's face still, pixelated and flickering.  

Instead, however, a shuddering line of blue numbers would shine onto her palm.  

Sana would grin now.  Coordinates.  She would swivel in her seat, hands already flying to the control panel.  

"Watch it, Doc," she said to herself in the silence of her ship.  "I'm coming."

END.


End file.
